Is Facebook going public?

Rumours doing the rounds following departure of CFO

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The departure of Facebook's chief financial officer, Gideon Yu, has tongues wagging this week, with the latest rumour being that the mega-successful social networking service is about to go public and hit the stock market.

Facebook's official statement on the matter reads as follows:

"We are grateful to Gideon for his contributions to Facebook and what we are trying to accomplish. Despite the poor economic climate, we are pleased that our financial performance is strong and are well positioned for the next stage of our growth.

"We have retained Spencer Stuart to lead our search for a new CFO and will be looking for someone with public company experience."

It is those last three words – public company experience – that has kickstarted rumours that Facebook is about to go public."In normal times, this wouldn't be much of a surprise," reports The Guardian. "After all, companies funded by venture capital usually follow one of two strategies to keep their investors happy: sell for big money to another company, or launch on the stock market..."